Contextualizing the copyright debate: reward vs. creativity

A bloggers' debate on the fundamental reason for copyright raises some key …

In a post on the declining revenues of the record business, progressive blogger Matt Yglesias wrote last week, "It is, of course, possible that at some point the digital music situation will start imperiling the ability of consumers to enjoy music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to prevent that from happening, and if it does come to pass we’ll need to think seriously about rejiggering things."

Is that the purpose of copyright law? Sonny Bunch at America's Future Foundation didn't think so, but his debate with Yglesias turned out to be much more than one of the numerous daily spats that make up life in the blogosphere. Instead, it went to very nature of a crucial institution like copyright—and it asks whether that institution exists to help the creators or society at large.

It's worth thinking about the answers.

It's my God-given right... or is it?

When you title a post "Piracy. Is. Stealing." and then devote a mere five paragraphs to the topic, no reader who has fought for even a day on the battlefields of the Copyright Wars is going to expect much... and Bunch's post delivers on those low expectations.

Bunch has little patience for Yglesias's view of copyright and insists instead that "the purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the intellectual property created by artists so they are rewarded for their efforts. The purpose of intellectual property law is to punish people who steal that which isn't theirs."

So—the basic purpose is "protection" in order to "reward" creators. Bunch does hand-wave vaguely in the direction of the Constitution by adding, "Yes, copyright was created in part because there were concerns that authors wouldn’t bother creating new work if they were consistently stolen from." But this is immediately undercut with the next sentence, which says, "More importantly, copyright law evolved because we think that artists, writers, musicians, and others have a right to profit from their labors."

Bunch asserts a basic right to profit from creative work; think of this as a "strong property rights" approach to copyright. It sounds good, but the Constitution knows nothing of this theory. Bunch is correct that the secondary purpose of copyright is to reward creators for their work, but only insofar as to encourage the primary purpose of copyright, the continued creation of new work.

In the US Constitution, Congress may use copyright to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." Note that nothing about author's rights appears here; if Congress decided that such promotion could in fact be achieved with a copyright term of a single day, it would be free to do so—and creators could not complain on the grounds that they have a property right in those works. "Progress" is the only criterion allowed.

"Monopoly is an evil"

This wasn't a radical new idea, but one that emerged from English copyright law. The Statute of Anne (1709) was one of the world's first real copyright laws, and it provided protection to authors "for the Encouragement of Learning," not because authors had a full property right in their work.

In 1841, Thomas Macaulay gave one of the world's most famous speeches about copyright, and he explained the principle in more detail. He told his fellow members of the House of Commons, "It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good."

But why should authors be paid—was it because they had the inalienable right to control their own work in perpetuity? No. "It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books; we cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated; and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright."

Again, the goal is society-wide progress, but copyright should not last "a day longer than is necessary" to secure it.

One does not have to like this. As an author, there are many times when I don't like this. That's because, taking this policy to its limit, copyright law only needs to help creators earn a single penny more than the smallest amount of money they need to keep creating. That sounds like a pretty miserable existence, one in which creators might never make much of a living even as they keep a culture vibrant and entertained.

Not that Congress has any intention of doing this, though; in fact, it seems as if legislatures around the world can move copyright in only one direction, toward longer terms—and this despite the tremendous outpouring of worldwide creativity we continue to see. The process is even more bizarre when applied retroactively, since the incentive to create was already enough to produce the works being given additional protection.

Still, this is how US law works (or is supposed to work). Copyright exists for society, and only secondarily for the creator. Complaining about that is one thing; denying that it's the point of the law is another.

Bunch's post inspired the obvious retort from Yglesias: "The point of intellectual property law is to benefit consumers, not producers." And he called in his defense Tim Lee and Julian Sanchez, both frequent contributors to Ars over the last few years.

Pricing songs

One quibble with Yglesias comes in his original post, when he claims that "under conditions of perfect competition, the price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0. That’s not a question of habit, you can look it up in all the leading textbooks."

This is clearly not true; the price of a good in a perfect world would be some fraction of its upfront cost plus its marginal cost. If I write a novel, and it takes me a year of full-time work, but it can be distributed digitally at a marginal cost of $0, that hardly implies that I should price it at $0. I may price it that way, especially if I make money in other ways—through speaking fees, perhaps, or other paper editions of the book. But a year of my time is a fixed cost that needs to be considered when setting the price.

In any event, what's almost more interesting than the debate itself is what it says about copyright. That is, even once-arcane battles over the meaning of copyright now appear on hugely popular political blogs. People can argue about this stuff with passion and interest, drawing in history, philosophy, law, and economics.

The public fascination with copyright looks like a terrific development, one that forces unrepentant file-sharers to think through the ethical and legal implications of their position but also prevents corporate copyright counsel from simply rewriting the law in a back room with a few Congressmen. One suspects that, if the Mickey Mouse Protection Act were put up in Congress in this climate, it couldn't pass.

75 Reader Comments

And yet, like many other well-worded, reasoned, and logical articles on similar subjects, this will go utterly ignored by the actual decision-makers. They're not about to overturn their multi-billion-dollar industry in order to satisfy an idealist viewpoint/state that might actually benefit both the consumers and artists.

One quibble with Yglesias comes in his original post, when he claims that "under conditions of perfect competition, the price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0. That’s not a question of habit, you can look it up in all the leading textbooks."

This is clearly not true; the price of a good in a perfect world would be some fraction of its upfront cost plus its marginal cost. If I write a novel, and it takes me a year of full-time work, but it can be distributed digitally at a marginal cost of $0, that hardly implies that I should price it at $0. I may price it that way, especially if I make money in other ways—through speaking fees, perhaps, or other paper editions of the book. But a year of my time is a fixed cost that needs to be considered when setting the price.

You missed his point. He isn't saying normativly that the the price should be $0, he stating as an issue of fact that prices in a competitive market tend toward the marginal cost of production i.e. $0 in the case of digital goods. Of course, that's is a simplification, since you don't have perfect substitutes but the underlying analysis is sound.

Yglesias also forgets that the business of selling music isn't a perfect competition model; it's a monopolistic competition model. Ideal market-clearing prices involve more factors than just marginal cost.

Overall, I'm not much of a fan of long-term copyrights as far as they pertain to low-fixed-cost goods (music would definitely apply as such); as it currently stands, even those on higher-fixed-cost creative goods (like film) are longer than are typically needed to ensure an adequate return on investment (in any case, the discounted value of residual revenues 30-50 years down the road would be practically zero).

In any case, the idea of viewing intellectual property rights less as a legal mechanism and more as a tool to signal creative ownership may be in order. Assume we had much shorter copyrights on music, say, five to ten years. Would that likely stop hard rock fans from buying a new Metallica album? If the price was agreeable to them, probably not. Would it stop Metallica from making new music? Possibly, but only if they thought that long-tail sales were integral to their business strategy (if they are, then I'd suggest another line of work besides music). Would it stop Metallica from being able to sell their back catalog, even after the copyrights expired? No. While true that music would go into the public domain much faster, in the case of my example, Metallica still has an exclusive ability to, well, be Metallica. They can leverage their past content, even without copyright, in ways that nobody else can, thereby giving them a tremendous advantage in the market. It's this aspect that seems to get lost in the intellectual property debate for creative works.

Thanks for this post. I think there will be obvious differences of opinion depending on where your interests lie, but IMHO this is a pretty accurate description of the origins of copyright.

A curious thing is the difference between Anglo-Saxon copyright and continental authorship rights. In continental Europe there are in fact inalienable rights tied to creative works, such as the right to claim and be recognized for the "paternity" of the work and to prevent its defacement (I think similar consequences exist in common law, but not statutory copyright law). However, neither system regards copyright/authorship rights as "property rights" in any way. If they did, any term (long or short) would be nonsensical.

In regulating copyright I hope this perspective isn't lost. Already we see a divorce between the law and the people's view: life + 70 years is far too long a period to subject most works to copyright, as studies have demonstrated that save for very rare exceptions most income generated by a work occurs in the few years after it's initially made available.

Copyright is in a way similar to industrial property rights, although they differ in many aspects. But the difference between the two are increasingly unjustifiable. R&D costs a lot of money, yet the industry recognizes and accepts that it has at most 20 years to recoup the investment. This hasn't stifled innovation. Why should authors be paid for their work even after they're dead then?

Add in the fact that in many cases, if not most, copyright is irrevocably assigned to publishers/producers, and the industry gets an even nastier image among consumers because copyright doesn't benefit the artist, but the faceless corporation that bought the copyright. I think this is one of the reasons why people don't look at copyright infringement as a serious offence.

When you title a post "Piracy Is Stealing" as Sonny Bunch did, you're disagreeing with the US Supreme Court, which in Dowling v. United States (1985) stated:

Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud...

... the secondary purpose of copyright is to reward creators for their work, but only insofar as to encourage the primary purpose of copyright, the continued creation of new work.

Nail, meet hammer.

Content creators are entitled to renumeration for their efforts in so much as it encourages them to produce new works. Copyright is not designed to allow someone to live off a single work for the rest of their life. The better the work is though, the more money they will make, but only because more people will be willing to pay for the content while it is still under copyright.

I find it disgusting that many rightsholders - *cough* Hollywood *cough* - are permitted to have copyright terms in excess of 10 years. Even 5 is stretching it in my book. After all, most films etc turn a profit in under a year, with the blockbusters doing this in under a month.

"the digital music situation" - why not do an article on the media transition from LP and cassette to CD in the 1990s and early 2000s artificially boosting music sales as people bought music a second, or third time, in a new format? Why is this artificial boost to sales being ignored so completely now? After the turn of the century, everyone who was going to format shift already had, and sales plummeted. Napster's creation in the late 90s was just a coincidence - I was buying CDs like crazy in 1999 as I was replacing my cassettes. Even if Napster had never happened, and Internet music had never happened, sales of CDs would have been dramatically lower as the 2000s continued. What we're seeing now is the normal CD and download sales of music without the boost of a format shift.

Betcha if Ars called the RIAA members, the members would not give any breakdown of back catalogue/new music sales on a year-by-year basis. I betcha further that the 1990s was a good split, and that back catalogue sales have been dropping while new music sales have stayed the same.

So the fact that I'm not buying new music has nothing to do with copyright, and no amount of copyright reform will help the situation. I am so discouraged that no work of music or literature or software that was produced in my lifetime will ever go out of copyright and be in the public domain that I couldn't care less about "piracy" since being a "pirate" is the only way I will ever get out of print music that the RIAA members will not sell me but still hold copyright on.

You missed his point. He isn't saying normativly that the the price should be $0, he stating as an issue of fact that prices in a competitive market tend toward the marginal cost of production i.e. $0 in the case of digital goods.

Well except that the internet meme that it costs zero to produce digital goods is patently false. Infinite copies theoretically means that the cost of production can be spread to near zero (but never zero since distribution even digitally costs) but as a practical matter needs to be recouped in a shorter time frame than the heat death of the universe because some of the expenses of running a business are on a short time frame.

quote:

Content creators are entitled to renumeration for their efforts in so much as it encourages them to produce new works. Copyright is not designed to allow someone to live off a single work for the rest of their life

How many actually do that? Even the Beatles created many works to "live off of".

It is good to look at the historical issues of copyright. When copy rights were first applied to music it was back when recorded music took the form of player rolls running on player pianos. People had to move by train and there was no radio, TV or internet. This left music some what segmented in regional areas. A tune written in Chicago may never make it to California and was almost guaranteed not to cross the Atlantic. The amount of music and the influences that a musician was exposed to was fairly limited and so new creations could come about independently.

Today when you are bombarded from music from every direction all day long and from all around the world things are very, very different. All and I will repeat that ALL modern music is regurgitating some thing that some one else has written before. The reasons for that is fairly simple. There are a limited number of notes. Only certain notes sound good together. Useful rhythms are limited as well.

For an example there are 12 notes in the western chromatic scale. Imagine if only the first 12 letters of the alphabet existed and you could only use words that contained those letters. Now imagine stories were say 5 sentences long. And you had the whole history of the English language to draw on and the internet existed. How long until every single 5 sentence story that wasn't gibberish was written?

Another falicy amongst may is that good musicians write and perform mostly based on money. As a musician I can tell you that is very far from the truth.

I'm just a lay person in this talks, but I have a few questions and opinions on IP copyrights, and this article.

1. Mentioned in the article, an author spend a year creating his work and should therefore be renumerated for that year of work. I agree. But what defines your cost of living for that year? Surely that should not include entertainment and excesses, no?

2. Copyright laws are quite archaic, having changed little over the years, just amended. Just 20 years ago, distributing music would be costly because one will have to pay logistics and distributions to limited geographies. this is especially true when doing international distributions. But today, digital distribution costs next to nothing (comparatively). so... why are we still paying these costs? Physical distributions has also become increasingly convenient and costs far less than before. So why the prices?

3. Agents and studios used to be the protector of the copyright holders. They take their fees from the copyright holders. But these days, they want a huge cut of the price. Why do consumers have to make them fat? Most of us would recognize that the issues with the prices of artistic works these days aren't because of the artists but the agents and middlemen.

If creators cannot make a living selling their creations, we have to find a new way to compensate them for their time. It's as simple as that. If that means that the NEA has to employ artists, videomakers, and writers and the government has to fund the creation of culture, then so be it. It's preferable to be "socialist" in this sense that to criminalize the sharing of culture. Why does art have to be capitalistic? Art does not seek profit, it seeks audiences. Culture is not a for-profit enterprise.

There's no need for the monopoly any more if we can find a way to fairly compensate creators, and government funding of artists is a way to do that. Patronage, donation, grants and funding.

I'm sorry but I fail to see how this guy can be taken seriously at all when the title of his blog post is "Piracy is Stealing". The whole basis of his argument is based on flawed opinion and logic and thus it fails miserably.

Originally posted by KeyboardCat:Content creators are entitled to renumeration for their efforts in so much as it encourages them to produce new works. Copyright is not designed to allow someone to live off a single work for the rest of their life

How many actually do that? Even the Beatles created many works to "live off of".

That's kind of my point. Copyright is being used in a way that it was not designed for. The Beatles (to use your example) have made a phenomenal amount of money, but would still have been very rich had the copyright to their songs expired after 10 years. If Paul found out one day that he was running low on cash, he could either create some new stuff, or do what everyone else on the planet does: get a normal job.

EDIT: If a content creator is able to live off their existing work, then there is no incentive for them to produce more - which goes against the original aim of copyright to encourage content creation.

You missed his point. He isn't saying normativly that the the price should be $0, he stating as an issue of fact that prices in a competitive market tend toward the marginal cost of production i.e. $0 in the case of digital goods.

Well except that the internet meme that it costs zero to produce digital goods is patently false. Infinite

....

[/QUOTE]

This has nothing to do with the internet. There is a common intuition regarding the value of objects that simply don't take "research and development" into consideration. Put bluntly, your overhead really isn't the consumer's problem. They see a product as having value based on what they can readily observe. If all they see is a $2 bit of plastic, then they will tend to devalue the product. This is the side effect of how people are used to living in the physical world. You are trying to fight against 100 thousand years of habit.

It doesn't help that the music industry has a bad reputation for being inefficient when it comes to the "research and development" side of things that aren't readily apparent in the physical manifestation of the end product.

Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

Great write-up. It really is quite amazing to sit down and think about where we are now (above) vs. where we started from. I think that to look at the subject holistically, the difference between individuals who create content vs. corporations/organizations needs to be part of the discussion. The term for copyrights to expire was, at some point, meant to cover the lifespan of its creator... but with corporations, who have an indefinite lifespan, creating content like movies or purchasing copyrights from content producers it really does become a whole new beast which seems almost irreconcilable with the original intent of copyrights.

Originally posted by KeyboardCat:Content creators are entitled to renumeration for their efforts in so much as it encourages them to produce new works. Copyright is not designed to allow someone to live off a single work for the rest of their life

How many actually do that? Even the Beatles created many works to "live off of".

That's kind of my point. Copyright is being used in a way that it was not designed for. The Beatles (to use your example) have made a phenomenal amount of money, but would still have been very rich had the copyright to their songs expired after 10 years. If Paul found out one day that he was running low on cash, he could either create some new stuff, or do what everyone else on the planet does: get a normal job.

EDIT: If a content creator is able to live off their existing work, then there is no incentive for them to produce more - which goes against the original aim of copyright to encourage content creation.

This comment was edited by KeyboardCat on February 08, 2010 17:25

To take this to the logical conclusion, would a monetary return be a valid limitation in copyright law? One that is difficult to manage and set a price point on, but somewhat reflective of the market right now anyway. Games and movies hit "platinum" editions that are cheaper and gradually go through lower pricing points, books become cheap paperbacks (and will in future probably become gradually lower priced ebooks like games). Why not just make a point in the future where, with the copyrighted item having returned enough to satisfactorily compensate the creator/owner, the copyright is removed?

I can't see huge problems with this. People still pay $60 for games, $10 for cinema tickets and $30 for hardcover books despite the common knowledge that they'll be significantly cheaper in just a couple of years. The big problem might be determining what's in and out of copyright, with the easiest way of preventing the system being exploited being stronger copyright law. But hey, I'd be for that as a measure to sway the industries towards such a program. They can't bitch about piracy eating away their profits and if you don't want to pay for media then you can consume the ample amounts available through a legal bittorrent network.

edit: Thinking about it, the big issue would be stopping the government from doing what it's doing with copyright now, forever expanding what it takes to hit "reasonable" returns so that things stay under copyright forever

Originally posted by darkmax:1. Mentioned in the article, an author spend a year creating his work and should therefore be renumerated for that year of work. I agree. But what defines your cost of living for that year? Surely that should not include entertainment and excesses, no?

Why not? If the choice was between creating new works and having no "entertainment" or "excess," ever, or doing anything else and having all the "entertainment" you could eat, why on earth would you choose the former option? So each potential author would choose not to create new works and society as a whole would be much poorer.

Enough incentive that someone who is capable of creating new works is able to ( ie , doesn't starve before it's finished) and wants to (ie, doing so provides a lifestyle that's at least as attractive as the alternatives that may be available) is the key.

To figure out the modern day purpose of copyright you have to look at who is paying for all the lobbying and "campaign contributions" to politicians. It's not the authors, musicians, and actors, it's Sony, Paramount and Warner bros. The MPAA and RIAA. The same organisations that steal from their artists

It's amazing how many legislators, politicians, and executives forget the true purpose behind intellectual property, copyright in particular. Copyright law was created as an incentive to create. It was society's way of "giving back" to the content creator. Works of literature and art are beneficial to society. But, naturally, most people don't want to work for free. So the idea of copyright was born.

We want the content creators to keep producing works that can be disseminated throughout society for the benefit of the people. In exchange for that dissemination, we agree to give the content creator a temporary monopoly on his works so that he can be justly compensated. In addition, should someone violate his temporary monopoly, we'll allow him recourse against that person. All of this is done with the understanding that once that temporary monopoly is extinguished (and it was very temporary in comparison to today's ridiculous term extensions), the creator's work would be freely disseminated for all to enjoy. That is the true purpose of copyright and it disgusts me to see how perverted it has become.

One final side point: no matter what argument one would like to make, digital piracy is not stealing. The legal definition of theft is succinctly put as the permanent deprivation of another's property. The piracy of a digital copy is not, and can never be, permanent deprivation because of the very idea that you're taking one of an infinite number of copies. The content creator has not been deprived of his original work. Piracy is, at most, the loss of a sale, and that presumes that the individual was going to purchase the work in the first place.

Your suggestion that I pay my surfs, peasants and freemen, more than is necessary for them to produce more little workers for me is unacceptable. Keeping them in their place is the foundation of how I stay rich, desperate men produce more than comfortable men because they must.

As a sometimes student of economics, I would like to address a few quibbles I have with this article:

quote:

One does not have to like this. As an author, there are many times when I don't like this. That's because, taking this policy to its limit, copyright law only needs to help creators earn a single penny more than the smallest amount of money they need to keep creating. That sounds like a pretty miserable existence, one in which creators might never make much of a living even as they keep a culture vibrant and entertained.

This is in fact not any more miserable than any other job in a competitive market. In long-term equilibrium (the natural state of a competitive market) marginal revenue (price) equals average total cost. Total cost is the sum of marginal costs, fixed costs, and opportunity costs. If you did not meet or exceed these, it would be more profitable to do something else, so you would leave. This is the same situation. The "smallest amount of money they need to keep creating" is the most that they could make from another job. If the best you could make is $50,000 copywriting for some company, then your "profits" from creative work should be about $50,000.

quote:

This is clearly not true; the price of a good in a perfect world would be some fraction of its upfront cost plus its marginal cost. If I write a novel, and it takes me a year of full-time work, but it can be distributed digitally at a marginal cost of $0, that hardly implies that I should price it at $0. I may price it that way, especially if I make money in other ways—through speaking fees, perhaps, or other paper editions of the book. But a year of my time is a fixed cost that needs to be considered when setting the price.

Economically, again, this is in fact true. Sort of. In perfect competition, price is found at the intersection of marginal revenue and marginal cost. If this is beneath your average total costs, tough. In monopolistic competition, which is what creative markets have to be (not monopoly, which is what they are under copyright), marginal revenue is the same as the price at double the quantity (it's complicated). The result of this is that price at a given quantity is greater than the marginal cost, and in equilibrium it equals the average total cost (which includes all those pesky expenses).

Copyright arguably exists to protect society from pirates, who would charge at a much lower price (because they have lower total costs than producers) and thereby force all of the actual producers out of the market. However, at this point, it is doing way more than that, as can be seen simply by noting that creators' revenues generally exceed their costs by a large margin.

If past works were made available for a reasonable cost at a reasonable retail outlet(say Wal-mart, local music store, etc.) then I do not see a problem with having copyright laws as long as they are currently. They do not need to be longer however.

The problem I have is that much of the music I listen to is out-of-print meaning that it cannot be bought in a recent format, ie CD, DVD, as a new product. The only recourse is to buy either an overpriced used copy(never really know what condition it will be though), or do without, or as distasteful as it may be to download from the internet.

Copyright was never meant to cause this problem to arise. With longer copyright limits obtaining older works is nigh impossible.

Originally posted by d@sh:And yet, like many other well-worded, reasoned, and logical articles on similar subjects, this will go utterly ignored by the actual decision-makers. They're not about to overturn their multi-billion-dollar industry in order to satisfy an idealist viewpoint/state that might actually benefit both the consumers and artists.

The solid truth. But I do hope with our internet-media friendly society (as it stands) will plant the seed for discussion about this very vital issue to the virtual world. I enjoy reading about both sides, and this article summed it up in a nut shell.

I think a critical point to make is that people who talk about "the centuries-old practice of protecting intellectual property" are simply deluding themselves. Intellectual property is a thoroughly modern invention, and its rise is inextricably linked to the vestment of copyright in corporations rather than people.

Lots of people mention the Statue of Anne, but very few bother to pay attention to the second part of the Statute, which gave various state functionaries the power to alter the price of books as they saw fit if anyone claimed they were too expensive. The Statute makes it clear that copyright was regarded as a means of reward, but not of undue enrichment. The word 'property', or its analogues, never appears in the Statute, simply because the notion of intellectual property was completely foreign to its framers. Those authors bitching about opt-out requirements for the GB settlement should also note how the Statute made it clear that an affirmative register of copyright was an essential element of the law. The notion that copyright springs into being automatically upon creation is another modern concoction, certainly with regard to Anglo-Saxon tradition.

The situation is slightly different under civil law (eg France), which has a few examples in its history of authors winning property rights for their work. Despite this, French legal history carries a tradition in which it is the editor or publisher who receives the greatest protection. There was a concerted effort in the late 1930's under Jean Zay to replace any notion of intellectual property with the definition of authors as 'intellectual workers' who were granted a licence which limited the rights of the editors who published their work. This law was actually supported by many authors of the time, but failed to be passed because of opposition from the editorial lobby.

The simple fact is that 'Intellectual Property', in the form we know it today, has little or no root in legal history before the twentieth century.

While its true the powers that be will never listen to common sense, so do what i do - keep 'pirating' all their works and force them to change. They will not listen to reason but respect an opposing force.

Convert everyone around you to the free side

The truth is, most of the new music and films are garbage, but i still download it because i can share it more effectively to people who want the crap (i'm on a 100mbps connection).. a lot of the music i share i have never listened to even once, and never will.

Originally posted by webmaren:As a sometimes student of economics, I would like to address a few quibbles I have with this article:

quote:

This is clearly not true; the price of a good in a perfect world would be some fraction of its upfront cost plus its marginal cost. If I write a novel, and it takes me a year of full-time work, but it can be distributed digitally at a marginal cost of $0, that hardly implies that I should price it at $0. I may price it that way, especially if I make money in other ways—through speaking fees, perhaps, or other paper editions of the book. But a year of my time is a fixed cost that needs to be considered when setting the price.

Economically, again, this is in fact true. Sort of. In perfect competition, price is found at the intersection of marginal revenue and marginal cost. If this is beneath your average total costs, tough.

I'm aware that this is what economic theory says, but it's quite obviously not true that (as in the Yglesias example) price should equal marginal cost and marginal cost is zero in some kind of strict equation. If I know in advance that my marginal cost for distributing a book will in fact be zero, and if I believe that the market will in fact immediately force the price of each copy to zero, I'm not going to spend a year writing the book (assuming that I need money to live on; those who are independently wealthy can still write, as can those who have the time and energy to create while holding down some other job).

Originally posted by yesno:End: Promote progress of science and the useful artsMeans: Create limited term monopoly

People seem unable to distinguish means from ends. You can disagree with the means without disagreeing as to the ends.

Also, when talking about "rights," does he mean god-given moral rights that exist permanently and forever regardless of the legal or social climate? Or rights under a particular legal regime?

yesno, you are my hero. Just by reading some of these comments, I can tell that a lot of arguments regarding these matters are rooted in personal opinions on who should get paid, for how long, and what for. I think that before we can reach a successful medium for copyright we are going to have to step back and really re-evaluate the purpose and the big picture of copyright in the U.S. today.

Originally posted by robrob:... would a monetary return be a valid limitation in copyright law? ... Why not just make a point in the future where, with the copyrighted item having returned enough to satisfactorily compensate the creator/owner, the copyright is removed?

Personally, I think this would be a bad idea as it would remove the incentive to produce good works. I believe that better works should result in the likelihood of greater profit. We still need to correlate potential return (i.e. profit) with benefit to society (i.e. quality) for the copyright system to work as intended.

quote:

Originally posted by robrob:Games and movies hit "platinum" editions that are cheaper and gradually go through lower pricing points, books become cheap paperbacks (and will in future probably become gradually lower priced ebooks like games).

This kind of price reduction is just market forces in play. People are less willing to pay as much for old stuff as they are new stuff. This is mainly because, as time goes on, more people will have consumed the work and are therefore less likely to want to spend as much on repeat consumptions. Furthermore, after-markets like second-hand sales serve to drive down the price that old works can command.

Originally posted by KeyboardCat:Personally, I think this would be a bad idea as it would remove the incentive to produce good works. I believe that better works should result in the likelihood of greater profit. We still need to correlate potential return (i.e. profit) with benefit to society (i.e. quality) for the copyright system to work as intended.

Originally posted by hobgoblin:2. how can you consume something thats not physical?

Easy. You "consume" a film by watching it. You "consume" a song by listening to it. You "consume" a book by reading it. Etc, etc.

quote:

Originally posted by hobgoblin:

quote:

Originally posted by KeyboardCat:Personally, I think this would be a bad idea as it would remove the incentive to produce good works. I believe that better works should result in the likelihood of greater profit. We still need to correlate potential return (i.e. profit) with benefit to society (i.e. quality) for the copyright system to work as intended.

who defines what is "good"?

Good is an entirely subjective term that is defined by the content creator. What I meant was that a content creator is likely to produce things they think are good (i.e. be "consumed" by the most people) if this course of action will net them a greater reward. If the quality of their work has no bearing on their return then they will just produce any old stuff.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this;When copyright concerns were being actively discussed in the past, it has been at times where it took long hours and a lot of effort to create singular works.Prior to the invention of telephones, writing music for any instrument could take months to years of work to produce a single song because you had to tune and retune instruments, had to write lyrics that would please the public ear, and all of this was done by a single artist or maybe a small group. You didn't have companies. You didn't have computers with software that could reproduce sounds and melodies without having to tune instruments. And if your music was requested to be heard, you had to travel long distances to perform live or to send a hand-scribed copy of your music to another artist to perform.Then travel got easier, there was television and radio to bring out more avenues to spread the music, and newer insturments are easier to tune- you don't have to find a specialist to get a horse hair to replace a broken string- just run down to the local store!Now we have the modern world, full of instant telecommunication and telepresence. You can copy a single song onto an infinite amount of digital space and only slightly less numerable phsyical discs that can contain many songs.

All of today's technology has only helped artists create more works of art and music and books and culture. They can produce is faster, spread it farther, and the higher population of the world makes it more profitable. All the while- they are still being protected as if their work of "art" took a year to produce (which in some cases it might). A band can spit out a 12 song cd in a year, where 100 years ago it could take a year to produce 1, maybe 2 songs. An Author could type up a book, have it edited, published, and printed all in the same time... 100 years ago the same feat could take multiple years and would never reach the amount of people it can reach today.

Look at many of these 'artists' and 'actors' and look at their lifestyle. The extravagance and excess is outright over the top in many cases. This is all done under the pretense that "digital piracy is stealing money away from these artists"... Even if the MPAA and RIAA are taking profit away from artists, how are some of these artists still doing so well?I do admit, there are many artists who struggle with original content they developed on their own. Piracy does hurt these smaller artists more than the big names because they have a much smaller market and do not have the publicity of the big names... Guess who the MPAA/RIAA are trying to "protect"? The big artists, the ones with 12 cars and 3 mansions and a personal jet. The marketable songs and names that sell the most. The MPAA/RIAA are businesses and are out to make money.

Part of the problem is that copyright is being treated like a single song or book or poem is all the artist can produce in a reasonable time, that the proceeds from marketing that singular piece of culture should support the artist financially... Problem is, modern artists can churn out these songs/books/poems at a fraction of the time it would take in previous years. While most of it will never be as marketable as a Top 10 hit, or whatever, it is still treated as if it should support the life of the artist.An artist produces 10 songs, 1 song makes it to the Top 10 and is heard by millions across the world (maybe billions). The proceeds of that 1 song would be enough to keep a small family out of poverty for a year. Yet the artist also gets proceeds from the other 9 songs.Then you have extras, like concerts and tours, and of course merchandise. I have no problem with what an artist makes at their public appearances or off of merchandise... they've put the work into performing in public or into designing clothes (lol), they can get a fair share for it.But the effective income from producing music is inflated for this modern age.

I'm not saying writing music and recording music isn't hard, I'm sure it's not any less difficult than servicing computers, engineering jet engines, or chasing down drug dealers in a bad neighborhood.But the big artists can make multitudes more than any other profession.It also has a big rate of failure and a short lifespan (music artist marketable span is about 5-10years).I have no issue with an artist making a few hundred grand a year... lawyers, doctors, engineers can and do. But the biggest names make millions. That's on the order of 100-1000 times the yearly salary of any profession requiring 10 years+ of education to attain. No individual lives long enough to need such excess, regardless of their age of retirement from "the industry".

Then you throw a middle-man in the retail scheme that marks up that "price" by their margin to make it even more rediculous. Then you throw in the middle-man to produce a cd, marking it up again. Then you throw in the retailer to mark it up another %. Digital distribution cuts out the retailer and manufacturer.

I'll add this in: if the bigger artists were made a bit less marketable through copyright law adjustments, perhaps the smaller "starving" artists would have a bit more room to step into the market and profit. I have no problem with someone profiting from their intellectual creation and our produced culture.But the market is very top-heavy right now.Having lifetime copyrights just allows artists to create small amounts of work and then profit for the rest of their lives while still maintaining extravagant lifestyles. Who else do you know that can retire by the age of 30 and have 3+ large houses, more than 3 cars, and never have to worry about money for the rest of their life?

Originally posted by hobgoblin:2. how can you consume something thats not physical?

Easy. You "consume" a film by watching it. You "consume" a song by listening to it. You "consume" a book by reading it. Etc, etc.

nope, as i can experience each "work" multiple times if i so choose. If i consumed it, it would be gone after i experienced it one time, and would have to be created again.

I was using the term "consume" as you are using the term "experience". I don't want to get caught up in an argument on semantics, so I am willing to concede that I should have used the term "experience" instead of "consume".

Originally posted by hobgoblin:2. how can you consume something thats not physical?

Easy. You "consume" a film by watching it. You "consume" a song by listening to it. You "consume" a book by reading it. Etc, etc.

nope, as i can experience each "work" multiple times if i so choose. If i consumed it, it would be gone after i experienced it one time, and would have to be created again.

Or, to put it another way,

quote:

from dictionary.reference.comconsume–verb (used with object)1. to destroy or expend by use; use up.2. to eat or drink up; devour.3. to destroy, as by decomposition or burning: Fire consumed the forest.4. to spend (money, time, etc.) wastefully.5. to absorb; engross: consumed with curiosity.

Originally posted by hobgoblin:2. how can you consume something thats not physical?

Easy. You "consume" a film by watching it. You "consume" a song by listening to it. You "consume" a book by reading it. Etc, etc.

nope, as i can experience each "work" multiple times if i so choose. If i consumed it, it would be gone after i experienced it one time, and would have to be created again.

I was using the term "consume" as you are using the term "experience". I don't want to get caught up in an argument on semantics, so I am willing to concede that I should have used the term "experience" instead of "consume".

Then you completely missed the point, because that's not what 'consume' means.

Originally posted by hobgoblin:from dictionary.reference.comconsume–verb (used with object)1. to destroy or expend by use; use up.2. to eat or drink up; devour.3. to destroy, as by decomposition or burning: Fire consumed the forest.4. to spend (money, time, etc.) wastefully.5. to absorb; engross: consumed with curiosity.

From Dictionary.reference.com:con⋅sum⋅er [kuhn-soo-mer] Show IPA–noun1. a person or thing that consumes.2. Economics. a person or organization that uses a commodity or service.3. Ecology. an organism, usually an animal, that feeds on plants or other animals.

You misused the verb consume when referring to consumers right here:

quote:

Originally posted by hobgoblin:a personal rule of thumb, if the words "intellectual property" and/or "consumer" shows up in relation to copyright, the debate is bound to fail.

1. there is no such thing as intellectual property.

2. how can you consume something thats not physical?

Keyboard cat was getting at the fact that a consumer, in the economic sense, "uses" goods and services. If intellectual property was a good or service, then you can use it as a consumer, just as you would any other product. You can't argue the invalidity of intellectual property on the basis that you can't "consume" it, because you typically don't consume most economic goods and services - you use them.